I miss him.Christ, and he’d only been gone a day. How was I going to cope when all this was over and he went back to his regular existence? When I went back to mine and slept alone for the rest of my life?
“Hey there, handsome.” Orla kissed my cheek as she bustled past. “Turn that frown upside down.”
“I’m not frowning.”
Orla swiped a mug from the cabinet and dropped a lady grey teabag into it. “You’re staring at your phone like it’s a bomb.”
Was I? I set it down. It immediately buzzed with a message. From Lauren. To add to the six she’d already sent that I hadn’t opened.
Orla eyed my flashing screen. “Is that her?”
“Yup.”
“You’re not going to read it?”
I wrapped my hands around the tea mug on my desk. “Folk broke the habit over the weekend. Made me realise how much of my life she takes up, even when Ivy’s with me.”
Orla came closer. “Babe, I spend most days with you and that phone goes off every six seconds. It’sharassment.”
“I know.”
“You do?” Orla’s dark brows ticked up. “Every time we’ve talked about it you’ve seemed under the impression that you’re the problem. Did Folk cast a spell on you?”
I laughed. “Maybe, if you count reading my messages for me as sorcery.”
Orla snatched my phone off the desk. “I’ll fucking read them.”
Oh shit. “All right. But don’t reply, okay? Even if she’s called me nonce or something. Just tell me if she’s said anything I need to know about Ivy.”
Orla promised nothing, and it was a tense few minutes as she scrolled through my messages, red lips pursed in a scowl that would’ve been sexy as hell if I was wired different. As it was, all I could think about was that as much as I loved her for her fierce defence of me, she wasn’t Folk. And I didn’t love him, right? How could I? I barely knew him.
“This bitch makes me want to pour acid on your phone.”
I zoned back into the room to face Orla’s biblical glare. “Easy now. No acid-based violence on my watch.”
“How about my stiletto in her face?”
“You’re wearing DMs.”
“You’retoo fucking nice. There’s nothing about Ivy in these messages. She doesn’t give a fuck about that kid.”
Another bad habit almost let me defend Lauren, but it wasn’t in me today. How could it be when I had to spend the next three days worrying that my kid didn’t have clean teeth or enough to eat in her lunchbox?
The sales phone rang. Orla reached for it and I took my cue to escape the building. I was technically done for the day, but I already knew I was going to ignore Rubi’s advice and bin off the prospect down to work the bar. It was a shitty way to pass the time, but what else was there? I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t pick up the phone and talk to the one person who made the ache in my heart bearable.
You’ve never been able to do that.
But for the first time in my life, I felt like I wanted to.
“Hey, brother.” Nash stepped into my eyeline. “Wanna spar?”
It was a rare thing that I had time, but it took me just one fractured heartbeat to say yes.
I trailed Nash to the boxing ring in the middle of the yard.
Nash yanked his shirt off, tattooed muscles rippling in the evening sun.
I did the same. Pretty sure it didn’t have the same effect on the hang-arounds who drifted closer to watch. Nash was everyone’s favourite. Good looking, nice, and tough as fuck was a winning blend.
